When it comes to promoting yourself online, one of the key components to any campaign is still via email. The problem is its not quite as simple as grabbing hundreds or thousands of email addresses and sending them a mass email via Outlook.

You need to worry about plenty of things but here are some of the highlights :

1. Is your email list a list of users who opted-in to be contacted by you?

Email SPAM is receiving any unsolicited materials that were not requested. If the users have not opted-in to receiving email from you, you are likely wasting your time and theirs. Not to mention you are ruining your reputation as an emailer. Something that will greatly affect your ability to email users who do want to hear from you.

2. Is this a recurring mail list? Have you emailed it before? How large is the list?

Email reputation is based on many factors. A red flag is raised by ISPs, SPAM Companies, Email providers, etc when a particular IP performs questionable mailings. For instance not sending bulk email for a long time (or never having done so) and then all of a sudden emailing 20,000 users would be a red flag. Or perhaps you send a bulk email to 20,000 users and more than 10% bounce back (invalid email addresses), that is also a red flag. To prevent raising a flag, throttle your email campaigns. Break them up in batches. This makes you look less suspicious but also gives you the added benefit of being able to test marketing messages. If something seems to work better than another, change it in your next batch. The other item to increasing effectiveness should be a no-brainer, but make sure you weed out the bad email addresses from your list to prevent unwanted bounce backs.

3. Do you know what your email reputation is?

If you have not participated in mass mailing before, your rep is starting from scratch. You should build your rep up before engaging in too big of a promotion. Again throttle and weed out. Your rep is tied to the IP Address of your mail server(s). If you change IPs your rep starts all over again. So be careful.

4. Do your email servers have a dedicated IP?

This is important, as your email reputation is tied to your server IP. If you share an IP, another user’s practices can negatively affect yours.

5. Are you using the same email server for your corporate email?

Mistakes happen. You should never use the same server for you corporate email as you do for your bulk mailing campaigns. You run the risk of having your corporate email being blocked in the event that you develop a bad rep from your campaigns.

More often than not, unless you are doing huge amounts of mailings (1 million + per month) you are better off outsourcing the actual mailing piece to an Email Service Provider. Recently recommended to me were ExactTarget.com & SilverPop.com. But there are many others. Shop around. The one key bit of advice is make sure you get a dedicated IP address, and be sure to ask about any potential hazardous histories with that IP address. If less than a few months ago a big SPAMMER had the IP address, it is virtually useless to you. If it has been largely unused for a several month or even years, you may be ok. But talk to your ESP (EMail Service Provider) just the same.